Toward a Transnational African Cinema: Image and Authenticity in La Vie sur terre

This article argues that the use of photography in La Vie sur terre undermines the notion of authenticity with which critics have interpreted postindependence African cinema. Evoking the historical narrative that opposes the repressive and ideologically driven photography and cinema of the colonial period to the authentic, self-directed representations of the liberation era, La Vie seeks to rewrite this history and thus expose as a construction the logic of authenticity that haunts African film. The cinematic image, rather than marking the recovery of an echt-Africanity undermined by colonial ideology, becomes a fundamentally ambiguous signifier capable only of an incomplete referentiality. This ambiguity expresses the transnational foundations of identity so that Césaire's negritude is rewritten without recourse to essentialist foundations. Through passport photography, La Vie rethinks national identity as an internationally negotiated concept that shifts according to the forces of global capital.